About

Davon McMillian is a Los Angeles–based painter whose figurative work looks at Black American life through W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness.

Working through portraiture and storytelling, he paints working-class people in ordinary moments of leisure, play, and rest: bodies at ease, hands marked by labor but finally still.

His canvases are built in layers. Painted figures sit among collaged ephemera and gambling totems like dice, cards, and dominoes. These stand in for a life lived between outcomes, in a game rigged from the start. Over the finished image he lays a black, textured redaction of spackling, pumice, grout, and charcoal dust, meant to crack over time. What stays visible is a fragment: an eye, a hand, a scrap of newsprint.

McMillian’s work traces how Black bodies, then Black labor, then Black stories have each been turned into capital. It asks how identity forms when your starting point is someone else’s ledger. He takes Sojourner Truth’s “I sell the shadow to support the substance” as a touchstone. He neither fully reveals his subjects nor fully withholds them: he obscures and clarifies, both.